Researching How U.S. Teachers Teach

Over many decades, I have researched how American teachers have taught and teach currently.*

Why have I focused on classroom teaching?

Mainly because I have a wealth of experience in classrooms. After all, I was a student sitting in classrooms for 16 years. I Have taught high school for 13 years, and then spent two decades teaching at a university. Certain straightforward questions about teaching have come to fascinate me: Have teachers historically taught the way that I have taught? How do most elementary and secondary teachers teach? Are there common patterns of teaching across grade levels and academic subjects?

While there are scholars who have researched both classrooms and how teachers teach, historical and contemporary descriptions of this common American experience still remain few and far between. These reasons account for my passion for researching classroom teaching, past and present.**

Beyond scarcity of descriptions and shared experiences, however, there are other reasons for researching how U.S. teachers teach and have taught. Each generation of well-intentioned and determined classroom reformers seemingly forges ahead unaware of what earlier generations have accomplished or failed to achieve. For those reformers eager to alter how teachers teach, they need to know not only the history of reforms targeting the classroom but also how teachers have taught in the past and how they teach now. Without knowledge of what earlier generations of reformers have wrought, avid contemporary reformers end up reinventing the same wheel that has been churning classrooms for decades.

Past and present, reformers in the late-19th, entire 20th, and early 21st centuries–for nearly 200 years–have tried to get teachers to alter how and what they teach. And out of these determined reform efforts that created the age-graded school, different teaching traditions and their hybrids have evolved with hard-core adherents praising each one. Current teachers and non-teachers (e.g., parents, policymakers, taxpayers, and researchers) cling to either tradition or blends of both. Knowing these traditions, then, is the first lesson that wannabe reformers eager to alter how teachers teach have to learn.

Traditions of teaching in American schools

From the early 19th century, teacher-centered and student-centered traditions have dominated classroom instruction. The teacher-centered tradition refers to teachers controlling what is taught, when, and under what conditions. Were you to sit for a few minutes in such a classroom you would note that the furniture is usually arranged in rows of desks or chairs facing the front whiteboard, teachers talk far more than students, the entire class is most often taught as one group with occasional small groups and independent work, and students regularly use texts to guide their daily work. Scholars have traced the origins of this pedagogical tradition to the ancient Greeks and religious schools centuries ago and have called it by various names: “subject-centered,” “teaching as transmission,” and “direct instruction.”

The student-centered tradition of instruction refers to classrooms where students exercise a substantial degree of responsibility for what is taught and how it is learned. Teachers see children as more than brains; they bring to school an array of physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual needs plus experiences that require both nurturing and prodding. Were you to sit for a while in such a classroom you would see that the furniture is arranged and rearranged frequently to permit students to work independently or together in large and small groups. Student talk is at least equal to, if not greater than, teacher talk. Varied materials (e.g., science and art centers, math manipulatives) are spread around the room. Guided by teachers, students learn content and skills through different tasks such as going to activity centers in the room, joining a team to produce a project, and working independently. Scholars have tracked this tradition to its historical roots in ancient Greece and labeled it over the centuries as “child-centered,” “progressive,” and “constructivist.”

Champions of each tradition believe that all students, regardless of background, grasp subject matter, acquire skills, cultivate attitudes, and develop behaviors best through its practices. Yet the accumulated evidence of actual classroom practices producing desired student outcomes for each tradition has been both mixed and unconvincing. And for good reason. Most observers confuse “good” teaching with “successful” teaching. Moreover, researchers have yet to link ways of teaching to student test performance because so many variables influence achievement such as family background, teacher experience, peers, school safety, and dozens of other factors including, yes, pedagogy.

Lacking evidence to support one form of teaching over another, faith–not facts–has driven proponents of each teaching tradition. Fierce rhetorical struggles over which ways of teaching are best for all or some students—often mirroring larger conservative vs. liberal ideological battles over religion in schools, ending poverty, child-rearing practices, and song lyrics–have ebbed and flowed.

Without a grasp of this knowledge of teaching traditions and the influence of the age-graded school organization upon classroom instruction, school reformers eager to alter how and what teachers teach will repeat again and again exactly what their predecessors learned the hard way.

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*Teaching in the Inner City School (1970); How Teachers Taught (1993); Hugging the Middle (2009); Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice: Change without Reform in American Education (2013);The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet (2018)

**Other scholars have examined the act of teaching, who teachers are, and traditions of teaching. See, for example, Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher (1975), Philip Jackson, The Practice of Teaching (1986); Magdalene Lampert, “How Do Teachers Manage To Teach? Harvard Education Review (1985); Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young (1989).